Selenium will not find my elements

Question

I have a project that I chose Selenium to open 1-5 links. It's stopping at the 3rd link. I've followed the same methods for the previously successful requests. I've allowed 17 seconds and watched as I can see the page load, before the script continues to run in my console. I'm just not sure why it can't find this link, and I hope it's something I'm simply overlooking...

from selenium import *
from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys
from selenium.webdriver.common.action_chains import ActionChains
import csv
import time

username = "xxxxxxx"
password = "xxxxxxx"
driver = webdriver.Firefox()
driver.get("https://tm.login.trendmicro.com/simplesaml/saml2/idp/SSOService.php")
assert "Trend" in driver.title
elem1 = driver.find_element_by_class_name("input_username")
elem2 = driver.find_element_by_class_name("input_password")
elem3 = driver.find_element_by_id("btn_logon")
elem1.send_keys(username)
elem2.send_keys(password)
elem3.send_keys(Keys.RETURN)
time.sleep(7)
assert "No results found." not in driver.page_source
elem4 = driver.find_element_by_css_selector("a.float-right.open-console")
elem4.send_keys(Keys.RETURN)
time.sleep(17)
elem5 = driver.find_element_by_tag_name("a.btn_left")
elem5.send_keys(Keys.RETURN)

`time.sleep()` is rather unreliable. See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2835179/how-to-get-selenium-to-wait-for-ajax-response — ivan_pozdeev, Apr 09 '16 at 20:34

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 09 '16 at 21:07

Well one of the reasons is elem5 is looking for the element by tag name, but you are passing it a css tag. "a.btn_left" is not an html tag name and so your script will never actually find it, because it simply doesn't exist in the dom.

You either need to find it by css_selector or better yet by Xpath. If you want to make this as reliable possible and more future proof I always try and find elements on a page with at least 2 descriptors using Xpath if possible.

Change this:

elem5 = driver.find_element_by_tag_name("a.btn_left")

To this:

elem5 = driver.find_element_by_css_selector("a.btn_left")

You will almost never use tag_name, mostly because it will always retrieve the first tag you pass to it, so "a" will always find the first link and click it, yours however does not exist.

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 09 '16 at 22:02

I wound up solving it with this code. I increased time to 20 secs, believe it or not, I did try the find by css, I actually left the a.btn_left, and cycled through all the elements, and none of them worked, fortunately, I could access by tab and key functions so that worked for now.

time.sleep(20)
driver.get("https://wfbs-svc-nabu.trendmicro.com/wfbs-svc/portal/en/view/cm")
elem5 = driver.find_element_by_link_text("Devices")
elem5.send_keys(Keys.ENTER)

Selenium will not find my elements

2 Answers2